"Trump’s Big Lie Isn’t About 2020 but All the Elections to Come"
?“WE WERE RAISED ON LIES—INCLUDING MANY LIES THAT ARE MUCH, MUCH BIGGER THAN THE BIG ONE THAT TROUBLES US TODAY.”
“How could so many Americans believe in “the Big Lie?” We see the numbers and we shake our heads. Poll after poll shows that one third of all of us believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Even though the matter has been adjudicated in scores of courts. Even though not a single scintilla of evidence exists that the election was anything but fair.”
Six months after?the attack on the Capitol triggered by that lie, commentators, political scientists, and families around the dinner table still struggle to come to grips with perverse reality. It is natural to want to understand how we got here. The fate of our democracy turns on not just what our electorate believes but why they believe it. Why are a third of us such gullible rubes?
It’s a question serious enough that it deserves a straight answer, even if that answer makes us uncomfortable. And I warn you, dear reader, the answer will make you uncomfortable. So, if you are tender-minded or sensitive to self-criticism, or a credulous stooge yourself, this might be a good time to stop reading.
Because even the most modest amount of analysis and introspection will reveal that buying into the nonsense peddled by the former president and his clown college of cronies is not an aberration, not due to some momentary lapse on the part of the American electorate. We were raised on lies—including many lies that are much, much bigger than the big one that troubles us today.
Excerpts from ‘IRONY’:
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“contemplation is a very dangerous activity.?It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then of course, something must be done.”
There are moments in life when we discover the fallacies in some prior teachings we have received. Such moments, tend to lay caution to youthful idealism and are replaced by new realities. These realities may rattle the foundations of our ideological and spiritual underpinning, but, they still enter our lives and minds without fail.
It becomes a defining moment which can leave us with a sickening feeling that descends to the pit of our stomach. It is a feeling that leaves a void of undefinable characteristics, an emptiness with which we are buffeted by – seemingly – ceaseless complexities in our analytical persuasions; then all that remains is a maddening state of utter confusion.
It is an experience that is sometimes difficult to replace with words; words that portray the consternation or anger which we may feel. Newness can sometimes be perplexing and the past events are not easily forgotten (or cannot be).?Ideas that are already imbedded in us, almost from the moment since our awakening, are not easily removed, but must be accomplished. Though, it is not easy to walk away; putting distance between us and our affinity for these ideas, it must be done. We cannot keep staring into the void, thinking somehow we may find the answer. We must instead, let passion guide our footsteps and drive our search for knowledge. We must purge our thoughts of many things we were taught and thought we knew before.
?We must not succumb to confusion in our life but seek to recognize that learning is an ongoing process fed by experiences that on occasion, are not pleasant.
To emerge from our aimless meanderings and find the sunlit meadows of new understandings, we must be ready to take risk and step out to change perceptions that have been disproven.
Such was my dilemma in my overall pursuit of a Christian experience and my desire to embrace our laws - without equivocation.
I have learned that despite the many contradictions that I have encountered, ultimately, I must seek to reflect upon my own experiences and to make sense of the unending flow of changing perspectives.?Hopefully, somehow, someday, I will emerge with a better understanding of what will be required of me, to illuminate a brighter path forward to a more unified world of Homo sapiens.
Author, Joan Chittister, hints at this condition when she penned: “contemplation is a very dangerous activity.?It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then of course, something must be done; she continues, “nothing stays the same once we have found the God within”, and she believes that “we carry the world in our hearts; the oppression of all peoples, the suffering of our friends, the burdens of our enemies, the raping of the earth, the hunger of the starving, the joy of every laughing child.”[1]
?For Negros brought from Africa as slaves and the indigenous New World population, the Anglo-Saxon’s presence has exacerbated this conundrum.
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